CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
“Laddie,” said Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, that much-enduring man, helping himself to my tobacco and slipping the pouch absently into his pocket, “listen to me, you son of Belial.”
“What?” I said, retrieving the pouch.
“Do you want to make an enormous fortune?”
“I do.”
“Then write my biography. Bung it down on paper, and we’ll split the proceeds. I’ve been making a pretty close study of your stuff lately, old horse, and it’s all wrong. The trouble with you is that you don’t plumb the well-springs of human nature and all that. You just think up some rotten yarn about some-dam-thing-or-other and shove it down. Now, if you tackled my life, you’d have something worth writing about. Pots of money in it, my boy—English serial rights and American serial rights and book rights, and dramatic rights and movie rights—well, you can take it from me that, at a conservative estimate, we should clean up at least fifty thousand pounds apiece.”
“As much as that?”
“Fully that. And listen, laddie, I’ll tell you what. You’re a good chap and we’ve been pals for years, so I’ll let you have my share of the English serial rights for a hundred pounds down.”
“What makes you think I’ve got a hundred pounds?”
“Well, then, I’ll make it my share of the English and American serial rights for fifty.”
“Your collar’s come off its stud.”
“How about my complete share of the whole dashed outfit for twenty-five?”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Then I’ll tell you what, old horse,” said Ukridge, inspired. “Just lend me half a crown to be going on with.”
If the leading incidents of S. F. Ukridge’s disreputable career are to be given to the public—and not, as some might suggest, decently hushed up—I suppose I am the man to write them. Ukridge and I have been intimate since the days of school. Together we sported on
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